Pinacoteca Room XI

A cherry tree gives Barocci’s Madonna of the Cherries its title. The Holy Family rests during the Flight into Egypt, the journey made to escape danger after Jesus’s birth. Barocci brings the religious story into a scene of rest, gestures and fruit. He sent the painting to his friend Simonetto Anastagi in Perugia in 1573. Its later movements took it through other religious and papal collections before it returned to the Pinacoteca. A work painted for one collector could acquire several institutional homes. Barocci’s Annunciation was made for a duke’s chapel at Loreto in the 1580s. Behind the sacred encounter, an opening reveals the Ducal Palace of Urbino, the painter’s own city. That recognizable building gives the story a connection with his world. Girolamo Muziano’s much larger Resurrection of Lazarus adds another treatment of a Gospel event. Compare how a setting, a group of figures or a familiar detail gives you a way into each story.